Twenty-five years after Wolfe’s fictional take on New York in the 1980s with “Bonfire of the Vanities,” he’s turned his attention to South Beach. At the center of his cacophonous, Miami-set tale is a Cuban-American cop Nestor Camacho. He’s in hot water after an incident involving a freshly arrived Cuban refugee holding tight to a ship’s mast. Wolfe jam-packs his story with Haitian beauties, Jewish retirees, Russians, more Cubans, hungry newspaper reporters, hybrid cars, sex addicts and lots more.

Charlotte Street

by Danny Wallace (William Morrow)

A Craigslist-like missed connection sparks this first novel from Wallace, who wrote the Jim Carrey movie “Yes Man.” Sad-sack 32-year-old Jason Priestley — not the “90210” actor, Wallace points out — lives over a video-game shop and writes about bad films for a freebie paper. The girlfriend who dumped him just got engaged. When a girl struggles with a load of packages, he aids her, she smiles and rolls off in a cab. All he has is a fleeting memory — and her lost disposable camera. Urged on by his equally sad-sack pal, he uses the pictures as clues to find the one he imagines is his dream girl.

Who Could That Be at This Hour?

All The Wrong Questions Series #1

by Lemony Snicket (Little, Brown)

About six years after the conclusion of “A Series of Unfortunate Events,” Lemony Snicket debuts a new series with a noir-ish take on his misadventures as a youth. Supposedly the creation of a writer named Daniel Handler, we find young Snicket working for a mysterious chaperone, S. Theodora Markson, in the town Stain’d-by-the-Sea — which, of course is nowhere near the sea. They are tasked with recovering a statue of the Bominating Beast.

A Free Man:

A True Story of Life and Death in Delhi

by Aman Sethi (Norton)

On street corners in Delhi, there are men hanging out, drinking, smoking, hoping for work. Indian journalist Sethi profiles one such man — Mohammed Ashraf — invisible to most in the teeming metropolis. Once a butcher, tailor and electrician’s assistant, he has become a poor, homeless day laborer. Through Mohammed’s story, we also meet an array of unforgettable people — the woman who owns a secret bar made of cardboard and the tuberculosis hospital’s barber among them — in what is also the story of modern-day Delhi.

Sign Painters

by Faythe Levine & Sam Macon (Princeton Architectural Press)

With hand-painted signs rapidly going the way of the film camera, documentarians Levine and Macon offer a welcome look at some of the remaining artists and their work, which adorns storefronts, walls and billboards. New Yorker Stephen Powers began as a graffiti artist; Las Vegas painters Mark and Rosie Oatis met in sign school; Ernie Gosnell, in Seattle, learned the trade as a teen from a sign-painting lady wrestler who “tattooed a little bit on the side.” It’s a toss-up as to what’s better — these characters or their art.